The real reason why eggs come in so many shapes and sizes may be childishly simple

A childhood conundrum finally answered by science.

I don't see any pointy ones in this basket of colorful eggs.
(Photo: woodleywonderworks/flickr)

I spent an unhealthy part of my childhood obsessing over the pointiness of eggs. Not round ones that cracked too easily, but eggs with at least one side that had a tip like a talon.

That’s because, in my family, you could go far with a sharp egg.

You see, every Easter Sunday, cousins and aunts and uncles would descend on my grandparents' house for the Great Egg Crack-up.

The contest was simple: Pick a painted, hard-boiled egg from a basket and then smash the tip of that egg into an opponent's egg. Whoever emerged from that collision with an uncracked egg moved on to the next round.

Collide. Crack. Repeat. Until … Grandfather.

He was always the last scary stop, his massive hand wrapped around the egg so just the pointiest tip was exposed.

A serious competitor, grandfather always laid claim to the sharpest egg in the basket — and inevitably crushed us with it.

For the rest of us, there were never enough pointy ones to go around. Eggs can teach us a lot, it seems, about equality.

In this Easter game, whoever held the last uncracked egg was the winner. (Photo: Sarah Laval/flickr)

But maybe we could have all had a fighting chance against our impenetrable patriarch if we knew where sharp-tipped eggs came from. Apparently, it’s a question that’s been bedeviling people long before our young hearts were bashed along with our eggs.

Why do they come in so many shapes and sizes?

Well, science has finally waded into the debate, offering a surprisingly simple answer.

For the study, Mary Caswell Stoddard, an evolutionary biologist at Princeton University, looked at hundreds of eggs from countless kinds of birds.

“We mapped egg shapes like astronomers map stars,” Stoddard told The Atlantic. “And our concept of an egg is on the periphery of egg shapes.”

An early 19th-century illustration of various types of eggs, including those from reptiles and insects. (Photo: Librarie Larousse/Wikipedia)

In fact, when most people think of eggs, they think of chicken eggs. Sometimes, they have a sharp tip; sometimes they’re rounded at both ends. But they’re almost always roughly oval in shape.

But hummingbird eggs? They’re wildly asymmetrical, befitting of a bird that spends most of its time in the air.

In all, the computer program developed by Stoddard’s team analyzed 13,049 pictures containing 49,175 individual bird eggs.

Keep in mind, it’s not the shell that determines the egg, but rather the membrane beneath it. And that membrane is shaped by the oviduct — the organ that the egg passes through before it’s laid.

Birds that spent a lot of their lives in the air had developed naturally streamlined bodies for maximum airborne efficiency. The oviduct, too, had become streamlined. And a long, tight oviduct spelled long, pointy-tipped eggs.

Chickens, on the other hand, spend next to little time in the air. So their eggs would be largely oval, with the occasional tip as an outlier. For an even more uniform example of roundness, take a gander at an ostrich egg.

Ostrich eggs may not be so pointy because the birds never developed streamlined organs for flight. (Photo: Museum Wiesbaden/Wikipedia)